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DORA MALECH, KARIM ALRAWI & ALISA GANIEVA

June 30, 2016 - 7:00pm

Prairie Lights

In a special event sponsored by Between the Lines, a part of The University of Iowa’s International Writing Program, American, Arabic and Russian poets, Dora Malech, Karim Alrawi and Alisa Ganieva will read from their work.

Dora Malech is a poet, professor, and visual artist. She is the author of two books of poetry, Say So and Shore Ordered Ocean. Her poems have appeared in The New Yorker, Poetry, The Yale Review, and Tin House. She has been the recipient of a Ruth Lilly Poetry Fellowship from the Poetry Foundation Center, and she has served as Distinguished Poet-in-Residence at Saint Mary's College of California. She is a co-founder and former director of the arts outreach organization the Iowa Youth Writing Project. She lives in Baltimore, where she is on the faculty of The Writing Seminars at Johns Hopkins University, and is serving as an inaugural Engaged Faculty Fellow through the JHU Center for Social Concern in 2015-2016.

Karim Alrawi is an Egyptian novelist and playwright with an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia. In addition to many plays for stage, radio, and television, he is the author of two children’s books and, more recently, of the novel Book of Sands, which won the HarperCollins/UBC Best New Fiction Prize. His international honors include the John Whiting Award for his stage plays, the Samuel Beckett Award for the Performing Arts and several Canada Council for the Arts awards. A former editor of the magazine Arabica, he has taught creative writing at the University of Victoria, the University of British Columbia, and the American University in Cairo.

Alisa Ganieva is a fiction writer and essayist from Dagestan (southern Russia) now based in Moscow. A graduate of the Maxim Gorky Institute of Literature and Creative Writing, she published Salam Dalgat!, her controversial first book, under a male pseudonym, winning the 2009 national Debut Prize. Her next novel was published in the US in 2015 asThe Mountain and The Wall. Her most recent novel, The Bride and the Bridegroom, shortlisted for the 2015 Russian Booker, will appear in US in 2016. In 2015 The Guardian listed her among the “30 most talented young people living in Moscow.”